Once upon a time, virginity meant something

I didn’t have sex until I was 27. It wasn’t because of religious reasons and it wasn’t because I looked like a troll, OK? I was, however, an anomaly. No one makes it to 27 anymore. No one.

Actually, I’m wrong. Actress Tamera Mowry came out last year to announce she didn’t swipe her V-card until she was 29: a mean feat in Hollywood! People were like, yeah, OK, cool. Shrines were not built in her honor. She didn’t receive a purity award. Her announcement was generally overlooked and forgotten. Why?

It would seem virginity just doesn’t matter anymore because … there aren’t any virgins left. How often in the media do you hear celebrities discuss “saving themselves for marriage?’ Heck, we’re lucky now to even see celebrities get married! Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie only took nine years. We are aware they did not wait until marriage for sex, considering they have biological children together.

I’m not blaming modern media for our lackadaisical approach to virginity, not entirely. If you think about it, the hippies of the 1960s did their best to expunge the importance of waiting until marriage. To them, life was all about “free love.” Virginity was a sign of repression. For Billy Joel, virginity was a tongue-in-cheek joke told via his poppy hit “Only the Good Die Young.”

Being a virgin does have its stigmas. You’re either a conquest or an ice queen and possibly both. As a virgin college student, I was not a prude. I wasn’t exactly a conquest either because no one would have guessed I was a virgin until my roommates announced it. Still, I think people had their doubts.

And for a lot of my friends, they just wanted to get “it” over with. I feel like that’s how most young women are today. Waiting until marriage now seems completely unrealistic.

In 2013, the film How to Lose Your Virginity was released. It is a documentary by Therese Shechter that explores our definitions of “virginity” and our views on the topic. Shechter tries to abolish the obsession with virginity and rolls her eyes over the idea that a super romantic “first time” is life changing.

See, that’s the flaw in this whole virginity thing. The state of virginity posits that we require someone else to make us whole, whether male or female. We cannot become proper adults until we are properly “penetrated.” Does that mean I wasn’t an adult until I turned 27?

What will become of the forlorn V-card? Will it go the way of the VCR? The CD player? The hardcover book? We certainly can’t hold out for Hollywood to come up with a reasonable role model.

I suppose it’s up to parents to talk to their kids and explain why waiting can be important, how it’s awfully nice to be mature and safe for that special “first time” as opposed to a rush job in a car after prom.